 International law will not save us. Treating international law fetishistically only buys into the ideological illusions constitutive of the system and its judicature. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas) A prominent global Marxist scholar recently went viral quote-tweeting a post cheering on the US’s imperial war against Venezuela, saying that “you are violating international law… you are on notice.” While factually, of course, this commentator is correct, I think it is much more interesting to philosophically investigate the presumptions behind such a statement. It is clear to anyone capable of seeing two fingers in front of them that the bellicosity the criminal US regime is demonstrating with Venezuela has nothing to do with narco-trafficking, and everything to do with Venezuela having the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Few people could be genuinely stupid enough to actually believe the formal reasons given for US foreign policy initiatives. Geopolitical and economic motives lie behind any and all policies carried out by the United States. The neoconservative moral crusades to defend ‘American values’ are, of course, escapades to defend and expand the dominance of American finance capital. My reader, I presume, knows this well, so I shall not labor on this point here. What is, instead, much more ambivalent is how many of those critical of the US imperial regime come to relate to and treat international law. In the last two years, the world has witnessed, chronicled on all of our phones, the brutal genocide of the Palestinian people. There could not be a greater surplus of images from Gaza which ought to chill the spines of anyone with an ounce of humanity. In this time, ‘international law’ and its various institutions have condemned these actions, to greater or lesser degrees. From the South African-led International Court of Justice genocide case, to the International Criminal Court investigation of "Israel" for a slew of violations, from extermination to starvation and collective punishment, to UN General Assembly and UN Human Rights Council investigations and condemnations, there were hardly any stones of international law left unturned. But what, my friends, was the result? Is Palestine saved? If so, was it ‘international law’ that did it? Considering the slew of Zionist violations of the ceasefire, I think it is not irrational to say that the answer to both is ‘No’. And so, we must restate the question Fidel Castro made in his famous 1979 speech in front of the United Nations: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” Or, even further, what is the purpose of international law? What good is international law and the institutions that claim to uphold it when one country and its lackeys can regularly violate it with impunity? When has the United States, "Israel", or — if I may be bold — the whole of the Western colonial-imperialist world, ever respected international law? Is not the very system this 14% of the world, which foolishly considers itself to be the world as such, one premised on the violation of any sense of sovereignty? On the violation of any sense of ‘basic rights’ other than those of the capital-owning class which personify the system? Are the rights and freedoms here defended not precisely of the kind which have as a constitutive component the absence of any real rights, freedoms, or sovereignty for the bulk of humanity? And so, let’s return to the prominent global Marxist scholar, which I would like to intentionally retain unnamed since my goal is not to mock them as an individual, but to ask some critical questions about a framework of thought he and so many critics of US imperialism share. My questions are the following: what is at stake in continuously invoking an ‘international law’ broken at will by the ‘usual suspects,’ to borrow an expression from Casablanca? Do you not feel the almost cartoonish naïveté of such invocation in the face of its continued irrelevance in shaping world affairs? Is international law here not treated precisely as a fetish object? That is, as a reified entity that is ascribed mystical powers onto it, all the while ignoring the real global relations which shape its function? What weight, in the real world, does ‘international law’ have over the US empire’s constant violation of it? It isn’t simply the case that international law isn’t working. That is too simplistic an understanding of the gap between the formally enumerated law and reality. We must, instead, see this distance, this gap, as constitutive of reality itself. International law under conditions of US hegemonism and super-imperialism is the global judicature that formalizes this system at the level of law, functioning as an integral mechanism of its reproduction. This is, frankly, emblematic of the Marxist understanding of how judicature is related to political economy. Bourgeois international law will always have a ‘gap’ between the enunciated ideals it formally upholds and the actual workings of an international order still dominated by capitalist-imperialism. This gap is not a mistake that can be fixed through reforms, it is constitutive of the system itself. It is a symptom, to put it in Lacanian terms, that cannot be removed without at the same time removing the system for which it is a symptom. As within the nation, the struggle for rights, and the appeal to existing legal frameworks to defend their exercise, is an integral component of the class struggle. However, for Marxists, there should be no naïveté and infantilism involved in our analysis of the ultimate nature of these institutions, of what interests they serve to reproduce in the last instance. Central to the importance of waging the fight at this level is showing the mass of people its fundamental impotence in providing true, concrete freedom and sovereignty for the working and oppressed peoples of the world. This is not accomplished when one naively finger-wags at the US, listing the slew of violations they’re actively committing to international law, and stating that ‘you are on notice.’ On notice, from whom? Who will hold the US accountable? This fetish-object of ‘international law?’ Will an army of the United Nations halt the US’s war efforts on the coast of Venezuela? Will international law be used to unite countries against this belligerent actor, pressuring it with global economic ostracization? If international law has failed to do any of this since its emergence, what good is it to make calls upon it today? As a state, I can understand having to keep up the pretense of legal formalism, but for individual scholars, journalists, and critical thinkers, is this finger-wagging appeal to the hollow authority of a fetish-object really the correct way to proceed? Is it not as if one is appealing to the authority of a paper that the US has cleaned itself with, and left with all its filth on the floor? International law will not save us. Treating international law fetishistically only buys into the ideological illusions constitutive of the system and its judicature. Friends and comrades, it is foolish to expect a victory when showing up with a pen to a gunfight. Originally published on Almayadeen. Author Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Party and as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think-tank in the United States. Dr. Garrido has authored a few books, including Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), and the two forthcoming texts, Domenico Losurdo and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Western Marxism (2026) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2026-7). Dr. Garrido has published over a dozen scholarly articles and over a hundred articles in popular settings across the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Iran, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Peru, Canada, etc. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes short form articles for his Substack, @philosophyincrisis, and does regular YouTube programs for the Midwestern Marx Institute channel. He is on Instagram @carlos.l.garrido Archives December 2025
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